


The Silence of a Summer Morning

by wanttobeatree



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Gen, POV Outsider, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-07
Updated: 2011-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-15 12:00:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanttobeatree/pseuds/wanttobeatree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after the Change, Gracie Taylor looks back on what happened to Detroit. AU from mid-season 5.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Silence of a Summer Morning

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ.

People still call it Detroit, although I guess it hasn’t really been Detroit for a long time. The name means something new now, though. When people say Detroit, they’re not saying ‘the city that used to be here’; they’re saying ‘ _this_ place, _here_ ’ and a million other things. So Detroit-the-name has stuck around, for all Detroit-the-city _didn’t_.

I was four when the Great Quake of Twenty-Ten happened. I don’t remember anything much about it, or about the days before it. Sometimes mom or dad or uncle Jack would start talking about something from the befores – cellular phones, micro waved meals, em tee vee - and they’d get a weird half-confused, half-amused look on their faces when I didn’t know what it meant.

 _You’ve got to move with the times_ , I told them. _Move with the times._

Mom always said that one of the biggest surprises of everything that’s happened since the changes was what happened to Detroit. On May 1 2010, it was a city and on May 2 2010, it was a smoking hole in the ground and Mom said everyone figured it was going to stay that way. Like a giant, black mark against all humanity. An ugly reminder of everything that changed.

Nobody ever expected it to grow so beautiful.

I know Dad pulled me out of class on the second anniversary and drove four hours, just the two of us, to the very edges of the outer fence. We stood there for a couple more hours, just holding onto the wire and staring inside, and then we got into the car and drove four hours back home. I remember the fence was hot to the touch, but I don’t remember what the black hole looked like. Maybe all that demon residue messed with my memories the same way it messes with cameras. A little ‘fuck you’ left behind in the wake of their extinction.

Dad took a couple pictures and stuck the weird, white-noise photographs in a frame. Like every other picture of Detroit since 2010, the most you can make out is a distorted kind of almost shape, and I remember asking him – me aged six and him arranging the photo frames on the mantelpiece – what the point was.

“To remember, Gracie,” he said. “That’s the point.”

A few years after that, the President declared May 2 a national holiday. It was officially called Detroit Remembrance Day, or sometimes the Day of Change, or sometimes just plain Winchester Day.

Lately, kids have been calling it Independence Day, too. I’ve never seen anybody correct them.

Anyway, May 2 became a national holiday and the roadtrip Dad took me on became a traditional thing. He’d always take his camera with him and document - in the same old warped and indecipherable shapes - the black hole’s creeping fall to nature. He said that if you lined them all up, you could see the change. He said you could see the blackness give way to green. I never saw it, back then. Sometimes I told him that I could.

Mom never saw it, either. Mom didn’t really get it – what Dad had going on, I mean. Her and aunt Cathy had been close, I think, but nothing like what Dad and uncle Jack must have felt to lose her. She joined the local Friends of Possession support group and talked it all out and it was slow and painful, but she got over it. She didn’t get Dad’s obsession with Detroit. She didn’t get the business cards him and uncle Jack printed out a few years after the change, almost indistinguishable from the cards for their software company except that these ones said ‘Hunters.’

It wasn’t that big of a deal, really. I think everyone knows someone who’s a Hunter, these days, and by ‘13 the change had settled in enough that people had stopped just rioting in the cemeteries, salt-and-burning every grave they could dig up fast enough, and Mom had started letting me play outside again. Obviously everyone knows the basics, even back then when people were still getting used to the idea, but not everyone can afford the grave-digging license fees and - let’s face it - not everyone wants to dig up a whole freaking _grave_ , anyway. So that’s where my dad and uncle Jack came in, Thursdays to Saturdays, evenings by appointment.

There’s something comforting about brother Hunting duos. People seem to like it. I guess it makes them feel like there’s a little bit of Winchester still walking the Earth, in the guise of Jack and Allan Taylor.

I can give you their card, if you like.

So Dad got me a silver dagger of my own for my thirteenth birthday and a couple weeks later, Mom asked for a divorce.

It was quick and easy, if not quite amicable. The Judge figured that for all Dad was a well-respected member of the community, his second job was potentially hazardous and would also keep him out late at night, so Mom got custody of me and she moved us down to California. She got a little house in Shurley, one of those New Towns from after the change, with salt lines in the foundations and pre-painted runes. There was no cemetery, just a crematorium. No Hunters, either; just firefighters with a paranormal training program.

I think it was as far away from Detroit as she could physically be.

We stopped being so close after that. I kept my silver dagger in a shoebox under my bed, with the fucked up photos of the black hole Dad sent me every year I missed the road trip. I dated a guy in Shurley High’s Friends of Possession society. I stayed out late talking to firefighters. She cried when I told her that I was going to Michigan State. I didn’t tell her I was planning to major in Paranormal Studies until I was safe two thousand miles away.

At the end of my sophomore year, I made it out to Detroit for the first time in six years for what the kids are calling Independence Day. I drove myself there for the first time, too, in the ratty ‘06 Chevy Camaro Mom helped me pay for once she was done having a nervous breakdown over my lifestyle choices. The big wire fence had been taken down years ago, when it became clear that the black hole wasn’t a mark of evil and wasn’t even all that black anymore. There are picnic benches and ice-cream trucks on the outer edges of the circle, where there are still ruins of what Detroit used to be. Farthest from the blast are a whole row of houses still intact, with guided tours for $10 and in the summer – on days like May 2 – an onsite artist offering sketches of you with real ol’ fashioned pre-change houses for the small sum of $20.

Dad and I had never bothered with any of that. All we ever needed was our cameras and each other. That year was like our special reunion tour. He showed me how the scar a class four poltergeist gave him over Easter was healing up just fine. I told him all about the paper I was writing on the properties of iron.

I remember crossing over the line where the fence had been – there’s just a plaque now, and a stripe in the grass where they used to lay the salt – I got this incredible feeling of warmth, like holding onto the wire thirteen years ago.

Mom always said that one of the biggest surprises of everything that’s happened since the changes was what happened to Detroit. She still says it sometimes, now she’s beginning to forgive the place for breaking up her marriage. After the Great Quake and the Winchesters and the stories of Lucifer melting away into the air like dust, everyone figured the place for a lost cause. My kindergarten teacher told us that Sammy and Dean had put the black mark there so all the angels, locked back up in heaven, would never forget how naughty they had been.

Uncle Jack just said that some things leave a mark. He said that this was one of them.

Then right in the centre of the hole, where Sam Winchester had stood and said ‘yes’ and then ‘no’, water started dribbling out of a crack in the ground. There were no pictures – there will never _be_ any pictures – and it took two months before anyone would even believe the helicopter crew who said they’d seen it, said they’d seen a river beginning to form. The only reason anyone ever believed them at all was because two months later saplings started to grow. And then trees began to shoot up, unnaturally fast - but what had ever been natural since the change? And the grass spread, and flowers spread with it, spiralling out and out from the centre of the hole, all the way up to where the fence stood.

On May 2 2016, Chuck Shurley went into Detroit with a salt-gun and a book of exorcisms. Dad and I were watching with the usual crowd of pilgrims, and two hours later we were still watching when he came back out and said, “There’s nothing. I couldn’t find _anything_.”

I remember people were cheering and crying. It became one of those _things_. Where were you when the Winchesters died? Where were you when Chuck Shurley came out of Detroit and said that it was clean?

I was on my hands and knees, picking flowers through the gaps in the warm wire. My dad was helping the Paranorml Unit pull the Danger signs off of the fence. Not too long after that, Chuck Shurley became Secretary of Paranormal Defence in a voting landslide.

Nine years later, the place was even more beautiful than it had been the day the fence came down. Animals were still pretty scarce – there were whole sections of the hole cordoned off from the public to encourage wildlife – but there were _birds_. Birds like you would not believe. I think you could spend your whole life studying the species that are changed and the species that are entirely _new_ and you’d probably only be half finished by the time you kicked the salt.

Uncle Jack tells me pre-schoolers are getting a new story: Castiel put the birds there, and Anna gave them their feathers, and Gabriel gave them their voice.

I’m not superstitious, but something like that I could almost believe.

Dad and I used to linger on the edges of the hole, taking pictures for his photo frames and my shoebox, but this was our first time since Mom had taken me down to California and we just dove right in. The further we went, the quieter it got, until eventually it was just the two of us and the silver gravel footpath meandering slowly down and down into the hole.

The centre is as far as you can go. The footpath stops there, with a circular patch of gravel in the middle of the clearing for groups to stand and stare before they go back for their $20 sketches and genuine Detroit-style hot dogs. On May 2 2025, the clearing was filled with tiny silvery flowers, like forget-me-nots. They trailed all the way down to the banks of the Winchester River, bubbling so impossibly upstream. On the edge of the circle of gravel, there was a small and polite sign reminding us to please keep off the grass.

Dad looked at the sign. Then he looked down at his camera. Then he looked up at me and he raised an eyebrow.

“Hey, Gracie,” he said. “Go stand over by the river.”

I didn’t need telling twice.

The river was only seven, eight feet tops, away from where the footpath ended, but I took it slow, savouring each step. I’d swear all those little flowers parted before my feet, because not one petal was damaged or bent out of shape when I reached the riverbank. I turned back to my dad, ready with the usual cheesy grin and cheesier thumbs-up which I knew would never make it into print.

“Would you look at that,” Dad said. “My girl in the middle of Detroit.”

I laughed at that – in that way you do when a parent says something that isn’t really all that funny, but you’re just happy to be with them, and I was so damn happy right then – and my breath came out in a cold, white puff.

“Shit,” I said, and then my teeth started chattering too.

Dad had dropped his camera and he was reaching for the silver knife he keeps on his belt, and I knew – even standing there, I knew I should have been reaching for the salt capsules I always carry in my pockets. But something stopped me. I don’t know what, except maybe that my hands – still clutching at my own camera – felt as strangely warm as they had when I first grabbed onto the wire fence, May 2 2012.

And then the ghost stepped out into the clearing.

Even frozen in confusion as I was, I could tell right away it was a class two – unaware of its surroundings, still trapped in the time before its death, not malevolent but not necessarily harmless. _How many people must have died in this city,_ I thought.

It took me a little while longer to realise it was Sam Winchester.

“Shit,” I said again.

Dad’s hand stilled where it was grasping for his knife.

Sam Winchester walked across the clearing, the silvery forget-me-nots shivering beneath his feet. He was taller than I’d imagined. Gentler, too. He didn’t look angry, or scared, or even ready for a battle – or anything you might expect for a guy about to face down Lucifer. He looked a little sad, I guess. Just a little sad.

Sam stood in the middle of the clearing, tilting his head back like he was admiring the beautiful day, and then a sudden chill spread down my side and Dean Winchester brushed past me, leaving goosebumps in his wake. I wasn’t at all surprised. It seemed obvious, really.

Dean stopped about a foot away from Sam.

Even now, some people still think that ghosts can’t speak. They can, if they want to. But I guess the Winchesters didn’t want to. They just stood and looked at each other, like they were the only two things in the world.

Sam reached for his brother’s hand.

“Gracie,” Dad whispered.

So I lifted my camera and took a picture.

Dean clapped his hand on Sam’s shoulder and then scrubbed it through Sam’s hair. Sam was grinning at him. For a second, they both flickered out of existence and I started forwards, reaching out as if I could pull them back somehow, but then they there were again, their foreheads tipped together.

I remember thinking so clearly _They died for this place. They thought we were all worth dying for_ and then they disappeared for good.

The flowers settled gently back into place.

“Well, I’ll be,” Dad said. “Well, I’ll be.”

He picked up his camera and rubbed a hand across his face and for a little while we both just stood there, staring at the spot where the Winchesters had been. Then we walked back up the footpath and left Detroit behind. We never saw the Winchesters again. As far as I know, nobody has. But we still go every year, every May 2, and we stand in the centre, listening to the birds sing.

I keep the photograph of that day in a frame on my bedside table. It’s the usual greyish, greenish, distorted blur, but if you look really close there’s this dark shape in the middle. It looks like two figures standing there together, merging into one.

I hear the kids have a new name for Detroit.

They’re calling it Eden now.


End file.
